Thursday, 5 May 2011

This is my first post and well this is the first time I have really used a website like this, so please excuse me if there are things that i am doing wrong.

Last Year I purchased a layout over the internet (Ebay) for around the $100 mark! The layout was situated in Melbourne and I was in Sydney, I had payed for the layout over the internet and luckily I had family members in Melbourne that could pick it up! So they picked it up for me and stored it at their place for nearly 1 year. Now last month my Dad and I went down to Melbourne to pick it up, we flew down and hired a car to take it back up! Of course we got greeted with the wet and rainy weather that Melbourne holds and that posed a few problems!

The layout was at a friend’s house, so when we got there we rang the doorbell and as it turns out he wasn't home, great so we called him..... Turns out he was in some other country I think it was Dubai from memory. Anyway, we got his mums number and she just lived around the corner. So we finally got to his house and I got to see it for the first time!

I was so pleased with my purchase that it was like Christmas! Everything was perfect and looked great. The layout was split into 3 parts, 2 small 4ft parts and 1 large 8ft part. We had hired the largest car that the company had…. a Subaru Forrester. Even with all the seats down except the 2 front ones we tried to get the 8ft section in which to much dismay it did not fit…,so we went to the nearest hardware store and bought a saw (yes a cheap wood saw) and some wire cutters. We started cutting away at the layout where there were no points and minimal damage to the scenic work, but the track was being ripped up and broken, to which I was over the moon with what I was returning to Sydney with!

After cutting the layout up into 4 sections it was time to load it into the car. They all went on-top of each other to ensure they fitted properly. It’s a little hard to explain but I took a photograph when we were back in Sydney… So here it is

To continue, we got the layout back home at around 7:30 after a full day of driving! You can see how late it was in the photo above!

The Next day I did an inspection of the layout and saw that the cut that Dad made wasn't straight and a little bent in places but that was all ok, so we got some of those wooden trestles from Bunnings Warehouse to temporarily sit it on.

That’s the story on how the layout made it up from Melbourne to Sydney and here are some videos of me talking about the layout and some sped up work vids.